The Chris Gonyea Project

Interesting idea by Eric Meyer on how to defeat comment spam. His solution, WP-Gatekeeper, uses a randomly generated question that users must answer in order to post a comment.

For example, the question I was asked when I looked into posting a comment was:

What color is an orange?

I think it is a really neat idea and even better, should be accessable (no JavaScript or images involved).

The key of course is to make sure the questions are random enough that spam bots cannot guess them easily and their logic would need to be greatly improved in order to have a chance at success. Also, which is probably far more important, the questions cannot be too complex. I know if I have to think about an answer for more then a second or two, I maybe less likely to post a comment on a site. For those who don’t comment on blogs often, they might even be less willing to figure out an answer.

They kept making excuses…saying that the Patriots had too many injuries, not enough stars, not enough household names. Yet the Patriots had all of the heart, all of the effort, all of the brains, and all of the pride.

Super Bowl XXXIX here we come! Are there any non-believers left?

For a long time, I have wanted to create my very own WordPress theme. However my graphic design and code abilities are nothing to brag about…for real. So I have always been more interested with tweaking other great WordPress themes like Kubrick since it was far easier to do.

I have started work on my own flavor of a WordPress theme called Manji. Say hello to Polaris 0.1 (a flavor of Manji).

Why that name? I happened to be listening to the Jimmy Eat World song with the same name and I thought it sounded pretty cool.

This is going to be a live showing off of this Manji flavor. What does that mean? Every change I make will be instantly uploaded onto this site and be put right into use. Why am I doing this?

1. I’m sick of the old way my blog looked like and I have no patience to wait for a completed redesign.
2. I think it would be pretty neat to hear from others on how Polaris is looking as it progresses.
3. I’m bored.

So with that, check back often as Polaris gets refined and updated. I am working on a project page for Polaris, so you can check there for more information as I work on it and when its done, download the entire flavor for free.

Changes in Polaris 0.1:

• Changed masthead.jpg to a custom one.
• Changed background color to blue
• Removed some borders around the masthead
• Added site navigation links
• Changed text color in posts to black
• Did some inital work on the footer

Looks like we have a classic winter storm on its way to New Hampshire. Tonight on the 11pm news they said it could dump 6-12 inches (up from 5-10 inches earlier today). If it continues at this rate…perhaps we could see into the teens with how many inches we will get?

About time we got hit by a good storm.

Update (Jan. 22nd @ 12:35pm): Looks like we are getting 10-20 inches starting around early evening and going all night long!

I have been using Mozilla since M14 (if I remember right) as well as the first Phoenix (then Firebird now Firefox) builds and while I always dreamed of a Mozilla product taking over the world, I never expected it to happen so quickly. To have the Firefox featured as the cover of a major computer publication is beyond my wildest dreams and it validates all the time I have put in trying out the latest builds of the old Mozilla Suite and then Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.

Asa is reporting that Firefox will be on the cover of Wired Magazine (I’m guessing it is for the upcoming issue). This is pretty cool because Wired is one of my few magazine subscriptions.The cover, pictured below, features Blake Ross holding the now famous Firefox globe.

I agree with Asa’s comments that they should have had more about the Mozilla developers as well as a cover photo that wasn’t focused on one individual (which is far from the purpose of Mozilla), as the media is focusing too much on individuals and not the project as a whole. Putting that side, Blake looks very cool on the cover photo. Hopefully this leads to another spike in the downloads of Firefox…

Is this Firefox’s first cover story in a major publication?